


Last Car

by Roadie



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: ...kind of, Alex has lost her driver's license and been dismissed from grad school, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - College/University, F/F, Maggie works on a train while studying part-time
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-01-22 11:48:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 8,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21301559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roadie/pseuds/Roadie
Summary: Maggie can usually tell when people are on their outbound rides or their homebound rides. She can tell by the state of women’s makeup, by whether the men have loosened their ties and how wrinkled the backs of their suit jackets are. Kitten-heels catches a 10 pm train for her outbound journey, and Maggie isn’t quite sure what to make of that. She doesn’t look like a third-shift type.And then there’s the fact that she’s got to be in her mid-twenties but never, apparently, rode the commuter train between Midvale and National City before that day last week when she got her arm caught in the door. Maggie has a theory on that point, at least: woman who lives in Midvale and looks like she comes from money, paying careful attention to her appearance, generally nervous and defensive demeanor, suddenly riding the train every day when she’s never ridden it before in her life?One too many DUIs. Lost her driver’s license. Maggie would bet money on it.But if every person is a puzzle, Maggie’s only put together the first couple of pieces. And she doesn’t know why, but she’s curious to know more.
Relationships: Alex Danvers/Maggie Sawyer
Comments: 137
Kudos: 291





	1. Maggie

**Author's Note:**

> Started this awhile ago, and I feel like beginning to share it. I'm doing this one unbeta'ed, so all mistakes are mine. Haven is my writing priority at the moment but I'll trickle this out bit by bit as well. 
> 
> This started as a sort of "Fast Car"-inspired AU about the kind of relationships that can build in the liminal spaces between an origin and a destination.
> 
> Then it evolved into a canon divergent AU that imagines what might have happened if J'onn hadn't recruited Alex from the drunk tank. 
> 
> ...it also imagines that National City has a fairly robust regional commuter train system.

Maggie counts her change and checks the charge on her card reader. The alarm sounds, a warning light flashing in her peripheral vision, and then old hydraulics groan and begin to pull the doors closed. She glances at her watch. They’re on time.

Then a jolt, and the door bounces back open like it’s hit an invisible wall and the alarm chokes out. There’s nobody there, but all the doors on the train are synced, so all it takes is one person’s backpack sticking out of one for all of them to bounce open. It happens at least once every shift, for Maggie, but she knows it’ll make the customers grumpy. She sighs, breathing the familiar train stink of melted plastic and old shoes.

The alarm again. The doors close fully this time. Maggie checks her watch. It’s not enough to cause a delay. 

A clunk, and a lurch, and the engine engages. She grabs the pole by the door and steadies herself as the train pulls out, accelerating into its travelling rhythm.

This ride, the last one of her day, will be the easiest. There aren’t many people commuting into the city at this hour. Most of them are third-shift workers, regulars with passes she doesn’t even bother asking to see anymore. As the train sways and clicks beneath her, she nods to the faces she knows, notching the occasional punch-card and tearing off a few single-ride tickets. A passenger slips by her, moving toward the back of the train, and Maggie glances up at her back -- long hair, kitten heels, a little unsteady, like the feeling of standing on a moving train is unfamiliar. She disappears into the next car.

Maggie starts with this car, the fourth car, because it’s the most full. The fifth car will be emptier. And the sixth car will only have a couple passengers in it, probably -- Tony, a sixty-something custodian at Lord Tech who always greets Maggie with unrequested flatteries, and that kid with the Beats headphones who’s never told her his name. Then, at the back of the sixth car, stashed in a locked employee stowage cabinet, she’ll find her textbook.

She has to check tickets between each stop, but there are only three stops on the half-hour ride so she should be able to get maybe fifteen minutes of work in.

The last car has a stranger in it today. It’s kitten-heels, Maggie realizes. She’s pretty, in a forgettable kind of way. Long hair, makeup, expensive-looking earrings, holding a black leather purse with a silver chain for a strap -- a mature sorority type.

“Ticket, please,” Maggie says, and the girl jumps like someone snuck up on her. 

“Oh, um.” She clutches at her purse, adjusting it on her lap. “I was running late, so I, uh, I didn’t have a chance to buy a ticket. I can buy one from you, right? That’s what I read online?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Maggie says. “It’s more expensive, though. Eight-fifty on the platform, twelve dollars from me.”

“That’s fine,” the girl says. She pulls her wallet out of her purse and unsnaps it. It’s full of old receipts. After a little fumbling, she pulls out a ten dollar bill. Then rifles through the receipts again, and then checks the change purse and groans. 

“Shit,” she says. “This is all the cash I’ve got. Can you take a card?”

“All major credit cards, but there’s a dollar convenience fee, so it’ll be thirteen.”

The girl sighs and shakes her head as she fumbles for her Visa. “That figures,” she says. “God, this has not been my day. Or my week, for that matter.”

Maggie holds the power button on the card reader and waits for it to wake up. “Sorry to hear that.” She tries to smile gently, even though she’s a bit tired for small talk. “At least you managed to catch the train, though, eh? Looks like you cut it close.”

“What? How do you--”

Maggie gestures with her chin to the bruise forming on the girl’s forearm. “Caught your arm in the door,” she says. “I’ve done it a bunch when I was running late for work. I know it hurts.”

The girl looks down and grimaces like she’s been caught cheating. “In the movies, the doors just bounce back, like an elevator,” she says. “I didn’t expect it to slam so hard.”

“Yeah, I know. Write your congressman,” Maggie deadpans. “That would be a nice upgrade if we had the budget.”

The card reader comes to life. The train window is reflective, stark as a mirror, because of the darkness outside, so Maggie sees two versions of this girl waiting, drumming her card against the side of her purse with one hand while she rubs at her sore arm with the other.

Maggie can see that the makeup covers dark, swollen bags under her eyes.

Maybe it’s because Maggie could stand to bank a little good karma, or maybe it’s because this girl seems like she could use a bit of a karma payout… but Maggie hits the power button on the card reader again.

“Tell you what,” Maggie says, “Just give me that ten and we’ll call it good for your ride today.”

The girl’s eyes shoot up to Maggie’s, surprised. “You don’t have to do that.” Then, defensive, “It’s not like I can’t afford the thirteen bucks.”

There’s a faint tone of insult there, and Maggie bristles at it: she’s never once, in her entire adult life, felt like she could take a few extra dollars for granted, and this girl looks like she comes from money, out-of-place on these molded plastic seats old enough to be marked with cigarette burns.

But there’s a sadness, a loneliness to her, as well, and something in that speaks to something deep and hollow in Maggie.

“You just seem like you could use a little good luck,” she says.

The girl looks at her, contemplating, and then lets her shoulders sag, and she nods. She pulls out the ten and hands it to Maggie, and Maggie pulls a ticket off her pad, tears off the end, and hands the girl the stub.

“Thanks,” the girl says.

Maggie nods. “Ice that arm when you get where you’re going.” 

At the back of the train, Maggie pulls her biochem textbook from the stowage compartment and a pencil from her pocket and turns to a marked page, swaying with the movement of the train as she works on the next practice problem.


	2. Alex

Alex decides, after her disastrous first evening trip, to stop and buy her weekly pass at the station before she catches her morning train home. Then, that evening, she catches an earlier bus to the train station. Kara is home for a few days and offers to drive her, but for Alex to be dependent on Kara… that role-reversal, right now, is more than the mangled shreds of her ego can handle. Her mother offers to drive her, too, but Alex would rather walk the four miles in her heels than spend five minutes alone in a car with Eliza’s disappointed, admonishing silence.  


She chooses the last car again. Yesterday, she’d walked the length of the train because people in the front car glared at her for boarding late. The ticket-taker in the third car had been gruff with her when he had to squeeze over to let her slip past, so she kept going, because she didn’t have a ticket and she didn’t want to have to ask him to sell her one. In the fourth car, she’d passed the second ticket-taker: a tired-looking girl of about her own age, black hair tied in a low ponytail. The girl looked awkward and unintimidating in her uniform front-pleated khakis and polo shirt, and she didn’t flinch when Alex squeezed past her. The idea of buying a ticket from her didn’t make Alex’s stomach clench with nerves. So she kept walking, figuring she’d stop before she hit the end of the train or the next ticket-taker, whatever came first.

The end of the train came first. She’d sat there, in the sixth car, which was blissfully almost empty. She imagined telling Kara that she’d ridden in the caboose. It was the only thing to make her smile that day.  


(“Caboose” had been one of Kara’s favourite words, back when Kara was learning English. She’d mutter it to herself and snicker. Years later, Kara had explained that in Kryptonian,  _ ka buse _ was an expression that basically meant “go fuck yourself” but translated literally to “suck on the tail of a toxic lizard.”)

Alex sits there again today, in the caboose. The same ticket-taker comes to her, and Alex has her pass out and ready for inspection.

“How’s your arm?” the ticket-taker asks.

“Bruised,” Alex says, “But I think I’ll get to keep it. Thanks for asking.”

“Glad to hear that,” the ticket-taker says with a small, but genuine-seeming, smile. She hands the ticket back, nods once, and takes a step toward the standing area by the train’s rear doors and the bathroom.

Alex realizes suddenly that, for the second day in a row, her brief interactions with this ticket-taker have been the easiest part of her day. They’re non-judgmental. She smiles because she has to, but it doesn’t look forced. “Wait,” Alex calls to her.

The girl turns. “What can I do for you?”

“What’s -- what’s your name?” Alex asks, because, of course, she hadn’t really made a plan for this conversation in the two seconds before opening her mouth.

The ticket-taker half-smiles and points to the nametag on her chest.  


“Oh, uh, Maggie,” Alex says, “Right.”

The ticket-taker, Maggie, half-smiles. “Yeah.”

“I just, you were nice to me yesterday,” Alex says. “Nicer than you had to be. And, like, it was--it kind of made my day, having a stranger be nice to me. It wasn’t a great day otherwise. So I thought maybe I’d write a note?”  


Maggie’s eyebrows cock in confused amusement.

“To, like, management or whatever,” Alex clarifies. “And tell them.”

Maggie’s smile broadens, and then drops. “That’s really nice, thank you. But, um, don’t tell them I under-sold you on a ticket, okay? I could get in trouble for that.”

_ Stupid _ , Alex thinks.  _ Stupid, stupid. _ “No, no, of course not. I’ll just say that you were, like, friendly, and patient.”

“Sure,” Maggie says. “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

“You’re welcome.”

The train clicks along beneath them for a breath, and another.

Maggie jabs her thumb into the air behind her. “Okay, I’m going to--”

“Of course,” Alex says, “sure.”

Maggie walks away. Alex hears the jingle of keys, the hollow sound of a metal cabinet door opening; then she settles against the window and peers through her reflection into the dark.

She arrives at work a little early, and takes a few minutes to type a comment in the form on the National City Regional Transit website.


	3. Maggie

Kitten-heels rides the train every weekday. After she uses up her weekly pass, she buys a monthly pass, and that’s when Maggie knows that she’s a new regular. She always sits near the back of the last car, and she always sits on the ocean side, facing forward, eyes staring out like they’re watching something far away, the coastline or the waves, even though the darkness outside and the light inside mean that she can’t actually see a thing beyond the glass.

Two weeks after that first day, Maggie finds a letter tucked into her locker at the National City station. Her gut response is fear -- nobody wants an official-looking envelope delivered to them at work when they’re not expecting it -- but it ends up being a good one: a form letter from the CEO saying that they’ve received positive feedback about her and saying that employees like her are the reason the NCRT is the state’s highest-rated commuter train service. 

So she knows that kitten-heels really did send the note she said she’d send.

Maggie observes people. It’s part of what makes this job tolerable: she can see some of the same people, day after day, and develop personality profiles for each of them. She thinks of it as practice for that future day when, she hopes, she’ll become a police investigator of some kind. She learns to notice details and put them together to try to form a picture.

Kitten-heels is intriguing. That long, wavy brown hair is always perfect. Her makeup is heavy and she wears false eyelashes every day, but it’s applied so carefully that nobody less attentive than Maggie would notice. She dresses well--almost  _ too _ well. Her outfits belong in a business-casual workplace or, perhaps, a trendy restaurant on a Friday night, but there’s no style to them. Her clothing reminds Maggie of an apartment furnished by someone who walked into Pottery Barn and bought the first floor display they saw. She looks good, Maggie thinks, but in a boring, out-of-the-box kind of way. Like someone else dressed her.

Her fingernails, Maggie notices, are bitten to the quick.

Maggie can usually tell when people are on their outbound rides or their homebound rides. She can tell by the state of women’s makeup, by whether the men have loosened their ties and how wrinkled the backs of their suit jackets are. Kitten-heels catches a 10 pm train for her outbound journey, and Maggie isn’t quite sure what to make of that. She doesn’t look like a third-shift type. 

And then there’s the fact that she’s got to be in her mid-twenties but never, apparently, rode the commuter train between Midvale and National City before that day when she got her arm caught in the door. Maggie has a theory on that point, at least: woman who lives in Midvale and looks like she comes from money, paying careful attention to her appearance, generally nervous and defensive demeanor, suddenly riding the train every day when she’s never ridden it before in her life?

One too many DUIs. Lost her driver’s license. Maggie would bet money on it. 

But if every person is a puzzle, Maggie’s only put together the first couple of pieces. And she doesn’t know why, but she’s curious to know more.


	4. Alex

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapters 3 and 4 were posted at the same time, so be sure you've read that one before you read this!

By the time she’s been riding for a few weeks, Alex stops feeling uncomfortable on the train. She has her usual seat, in her usual car. Maggie glances at Alex’s pass, usually smiles a little and nods, and sometimes makes a little small talk about the weather. Then she goes to the back of the train and stays there until after the next stop, when she walks through to check tickets again.

Alex has been riding about a month when she braves the bathroom for the first time.

She’s heard horror stories, but figures it can’t possibly be worse than a lot of the bar bathrooms or concert port-o-potties she’s used. And she barely got to sleep today. The home health aide took a bathroom break long enough to allow Alex’s grandmother to get out of the house and go on a walkabout. Her mom was at work, and Kara at her own place in National City, so the aide had to wake Alex in the middle of a REM cycle. The two of them had driven all over the neighborhood before finding Gran just a few houses down the road. She had, apparently, made her way into a backyard and sat down at the patio table there. The retiree couple who lived there had quickly figured out that Gran was disoriented and couldn’t tell them where she lived, so they’d called the police for lack of knowing what else to do to help. Alex dealt with them, and with the police, and then she dealt with the apologetic home health aide who explained tearfully that she wasn’t wasting time in the bathroom, she was just on the first day of her period. And then she dealt with her mother, who was upset not to have been notified the moment Gran went missing.

Alex could have tried to get another hour of sleep after all that, but there hardly seemed to be any point. So she brewed herself a huge pot of coffee, drank two cups in the kitchen and carried a third in a travel mug when she left for work. And now, ten minutes into her trip, she realizes she isn’t going to last the remaining twenty.

So she steels herself and goes to use the stall in the back of the car. 

In the corner of her eye, as she opens the door, she sees Maggie, frowning down at something she has propped on the counter above the storage unit there.

The bathroom isn’t as bad as she’d feared, which is nice to know for the days when she’s rushing, but she opens the door to a muffled growling sound and something comes flying at her, bouncing off her shoulder and clattering to the floor.

She glances down. It’s a ball-point pen.

“Oh my God,” Maggie says, one hand flying to cover her mouth, “I am so sorry, I just--it flew out of my hand, and--” 

Maggie’s obvious shame feels disproportionate to the crime, Alex thinks, so she tries to offer a comforting smile when she picks up the pen and walks the two steps to offer it back. “It’s okay, no harm done. But what’d the pen ever do to you?”

Maggie offers a clipped, reserved laugh as she takes the pen Alex holds out to her, keeping her eyes down and turned to the side. She fumbles a hand behind her, clearly trying to push something out of the way, but all that does is draw Alex’s attention. And were Alex more self-aware, were she less sleep-deprived in this moment, she might recognize that Maggie is trying to hide something -- and she’s not being subtle about it. She might realize that the tactful thing to do would be to return to her seat with no further conversation.

But Alex is tired, and wired, and even on her good days has rarely been tactful. So she tips her head just far enough to catch the edge of what Maggie is hiding, and:

“Oh, shit, biochemistry,” she says. She’d know that textbook anywhere. “I’d say that’s worth throwing a pen over.”

A flash of fear crosses through Maggie’s eyes, followed by resignation, her shoulders dropping. “It’s kicking my ass,” she says, turning to look down at the open page. Then, dryly, “I threw the pen at the book, though, not at you. It bounced.”

Alex smiles and takes a step closer. When Maggie turned, her body shifted, so now Alex can see the page and the dog-eared note-paper covered in notes and scribbles and crossed-out calculations. It’s the amino acids unit. Rough. “You taking it at NCU? With Cooperman?”

Maggie looks up at her, eyes wide with surprise. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

“Educated guess,” Alex says. “I recognized the textbook. I was the TA for that course last year, actually.”

“Oh,” Maggie says, with a slow nod; it’s clear she doesn’t know what else to say. She turns the pen in her hands, a nervous fidget. “Well, I don’t know how you get to where you can teach this stuff. This biochem course is all that stands between me and graduation, and I just… I’m pretty sure I can scramble a pass, but my major requires a B-, and I’m… not terrible, but not that.”

Something snaps into place in Alex’s foggy brain: she suddenly recognizes Maggie’s shifty posture, her fidgeting with the pen, as the cues that, of course, Maggie wants to get back to her studying.

“Okay, well,” Alex says, “Good luck. I--I’ll just--” she gestures back down the aisle, toward her seat.

“Okay,” Maggie say. 

Alex has turned and taken half a step when Maggie says, “Oh, um -- wait, Ma’am?”

She turns back. “Alex.”

“Excuse me?”

“My name. It’s Alex.”

“Oh,” Maggie says, sounding surprised. “Okay, well, Alex, listen… I could--I could really, really get in trouble for studying on shift. Even though I check tickets between every stop, I’m not supposed to do other things, or be on my phone, or whatever, so like--”

“Don’t worry, Maggie,” Alex says. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

Maggie’s shoulders sag in relief. “Thanks.”

“Of course.”

Alex makes her way back to her seat, berating herself silently for having interrupted Maggie’s work, for having misread the cues that asked to be left alone, for having pushed her to talk when she clearly didn’t want to. 

Self-deprecation has become kind of a sport, for Alex. She excels at it. She’s pretty sure that it is, in fact, the only thing she currently excels at. She’s not good for much, these days, except for telling herself how little she’s good for.

Biochemistry, though. She was good at that, once. She’d liked TAing more than she thought she would. Cooperman was a brilliant scientist but not a great teacher; he didn’t know how to pitch things beginner-level. She’d have office hours packed with undergrads asking questions; after a few weeks, she asked the department administrator to book her a classroom where her office hours became big group tutoring sessions.

Until her classes got worse. Until she started sleeping too late to show up. Until the department head railed at her for not doing her job properly on top of not doing her schoolwork properly.

But she’d been really, really good at helping undergrads learn biochem. One of them, a sweet girl named Stephanie, had sent her a card at the end of the semester: “Thank you so much for your help at the beginning of the semester. Without it, I wouldn’t have passed the class. I don’t know what made you have to cancel office hours at the end of the semester, but I know it must have been important, and I hope it ends well, whatever it is.”

Oh yeah, kid, super important. In the way that sleeping off too-frequent hangovers, or making too-frequent walks of shame after too-frequent one-night-stands, is important.

Stephanie got a B- in the class. Alex could look it up in the online system, even long after she’d stopped doing any work. She was still the TA on paper, so she still had access. 

If Alex had kept up the tutoring sessions, Stephanie would have gotten an A. Surely. 

But hey. The main thing Alex is good for, these days, is disappointing everyone who matters.

Off her right shoulder, she hears an exhaled sigh of frustration.

If she weren’t so exhausted, if she weren’t so underslept, it wouldn’t have taken her until this moment, this very moment, to realize that she could offer to help.

Of course she can help. If Maggie has a B- grade target, that means she’s majoring in Biochemistry, Bioengineering, or Forensic Science, or she’s on a pre-med track, and in all of those cases, the stakes are high. And Maggie isn’t a typical college kid, Alex can see that. She isn’t sure how old she is, exactly, but definitely closer to Alex’s own age than to the age of your average undergrad.

Alex stands up. The train lurches and she steadies herself on a seat-back, and then she makes her way back toward the bathroom. The leather of her purse crumples under her grip; her nerves, she knows, would compel her to fiddle with her fingers otherwise.

(Where is the version of her who could seduce a stranger in a bar with barely a word? Where is the version who shot down Kara’s childhood bullies? Somewhere between the academic dismissal, and the court appearance over her last DUI, and the night-shift lab job that barely requires a Bachelor’s, and her mother’s disapproving glares, that part of her seems to have withered into this: a jittery twenty-four-year-old who’s reverted to her childhood nail-biting habits and is afraid of rejection from a NCRT employee who could clearly use her help.)

Maggie has her fingers driven deep into her hair, messing up her ponytail, her frustration strung in the tension of every muscle.

“Excuse me, Maggie?”

Maggie looks up. Her eyes are wide. “Yes? Can I do something for you, Alex?” She sets her pen in the hollow of the book’s spine and pulls out her hair tie, releasing her disheveled ponytail. Her long hair falls loose for just a moment. Then she gathers it and re-ties it.

“No, I’m good,” Alex says. She inhales deep, to the bottom of her lungs, searching for a courage that this simple offer shouldn’t require. “I just,” she tries. Her voice catches. She starts again. “I just wanted to offer to, um, help. With the biochem, I mean. If you want. No pressure, of course.”

Maggie blinks at her for two, three, four long seconds, and then she smiles, deep and wide. She has dimples, Alex notices: deep, parenthetical ones that make her face seem younger but her eyes wiser. “I was trying to work up the courage to ask you,” Maggie says. “I didn’t want to overstep.”

Alex feels herself smile, too. “Not an overstep. I used to like teaching this stuff. And, I mean, we have this time together every day anyway.” 

“Yeah, we do.”

The train begins to slow down as it pulls into the final stop before the terminal at National City Central. Maggie rolls her eyes a bit, as if in apology. 

“I have to walk my beat in a second. It’ll only take a couple minutes, nobody ever gets on here at this time of day.”

“Okay,” Alex says. “I can have a look at your notes and see if I can figure out where you’re stuck. ”

Maggie presses her palms together, fingers outstretched, and touches her fingertips to her chin. It looks like prayer, and it looks like thanks. She grins. “That would be amazing.”

The train leans forward like a dog into its leash as it settles into its halt. The doors jerk open.

“I have to--” Maggie says, pointing her thumb over her shoulder, back down the car. “It’s easiest if I start in car four.”

Alex smiles. “Go. I’m going to look this over, and we’ll talk when you get back.”

Maggie points at Alex, both pointer fingers outstretched, as she backs down the aisle. “This is amazing.”

Alex smiles wider. 

As she turns to look down at the textbook, she realizes that she hasn’t smiled like this -- broadly, without having to work for it -- for weeks.


	5. Maggie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> American federal politics are THE WORST so let's all forget about them for at least as long as it takes to read this chapter, okay?
> 
> Shout-out to [ironicpotential](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ironicpotential/pseuds/ironicpotential) for helping me out with the science here!

Easy as old friends, Alex and Maggie settle into a new pattern. 

Before the train arrives at Midvale station, Maggie places her textbook and her notes on the seat in the sixth car that she’s come to think of as Alex’s seat. She checks tickets as quickly as she can. The customers who like to make small-talk with her learn, quickly, that she doesn’t want to hear it anymore; it’s not like NCRT is going to fire her for it. 

When she gets to the final car, she doesn’t bother to check Alex’s pass. It’s an unspoken agreement between them that she won’t check Alex’s pass, which means that Alex could choose not to buy tickets if she’s willing to take the risk of random inspections. Although Maggie would do her best to slip Alex a ticket if that happened, of course. 

By the time Maggie reaches the end of the car, Alex has reviewed her notes, and follows her into the compartment space by the door behind the bathroom. They prop up the textbook there. Their bodies cast a shadow over it the book, so one of them turns on her cell phone flashlight, and they talk, quietly, for the ten minutes or so until Maggie has to take the next round of tickets. 

From day one, it helps.

“Just remember ‘Gap VW Lymph,” Alex says.

Maggie blinks at her. “What?”

“You keep confusing which amino acids are non-polar, right?” Alex says. “So remember GAPVWLIMF. Gap VW Lymph. Lymph is vital for fatty acid transport, and fatty acid tails are non-polar.”

Maggie blinks at Alex, and then looks down at the page, where Alex is pointing at her notes. 

“See, why doesn’t _ he _ tell us that?” Maggie says. “That just -- it makes it so much easier.”

“Cooperman has high ideals about education. He thinks that really understanding something means you shouldn’t need mnemonics to remember it.”

“Fair enough, but like, can’t we just start somewhere?”

“That’s what I think, too.”

“They should hire you to teach this class.”

Alex stiffens, her body hardening for just a second against the sway of the car.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she says.

But Maggie has worked on observing people for a long time, and she notices that brief moment, that little hitch. Her instinct is to apologize, but she’s observed enough to know that apologizing would probably escalate the tension by acknowledging it.

She points to the next problem on the page, instead.

When Maggie gets her next quiz back, she doesn’t leave it on Alex’s seat with the textbook and the notes. She folds it into quarters and tucks it into the pouch behind the card-reader she rarely uses. 

“Where’s your quiz?” Alex asks, when Maggie makes it to the back of the train. “Didn’t you say you were supposed to get it back yesterday?”

And Maggie grins, and reaches into her pocket, and pulls out the quiz. She unfolds it, makes a show of flattening the creases against her chest without showing the grade, grinning. 

Alex rolls her eyes at her.

“Boom!” she says, slapping the paper onto the cover of the textbook, the number 80 written in red pen at the top.

The best she’d ever managed to score without Alex’s help was a 76, and she usually scored more like 72 or 73.

“Oh, dude!” Alex exclaims. “That’s huge! Congratulations!”

“You’ve been so helpful,” Maggie says. “I can’t tell you how much you’ve helped me.”

Alex smiles in a way that Maggie has never seen before. For all the care she puts into her appearance, Alex carries herself like her existence is an apology for something else. But this smile, right now, reveals to Maggie a side of Alex she’s never seen: it’s broad and so bright Maggie thinks it should glint off the window beside them and the darkness beyond it.

“Really,” Maggie says, “I owe you big.”

Alex’s smile softens, it turns into something smaller and more intimate.

“You don’t,” she says. “This has been good for me, too.”

The moment tugs on something in Maggie, at her heart--and maybe something else, too. Her body wants to lean in a little closer. It’s not attraction, precisely. Alex is beautiful, in the way many women are beautiful, which is not the kind of beauty that tends to draw Maggie’s attention. But Alex’s smile, the second, smaller version, makes Maggie want to lean into it.

Alex’ words feel like an invitation to ask the question that Maggie has wanted to ask since the day they first spoke. Alex is still a bit of an enigma, riding the train at this hour, dressed as she is. If she were in grad school at NCU and commuting from Midvale, she’d be travelling the opposite direction at this hour. 

She can’t ask. It feels intrusive, invasive, to ask.

But Alex must want to offer something anyway. Her breath, and then her words, jolt slowly from her, nerves forcing space between them.

“I’m… I had to take some time away. From school.” She tucks her hair behind her ear but keeps her eyes down, looking at her fingertips touching the edge of Maggie’s test paper. “I just… it wasn’t working out. For me. My grades were bad. Otherwise, who knows.” She laughs a little and looks up at Maggie again. “I might have been your biochem TA this semester.” 

There’s more to the story. Maggie’s sure of it. Alex is scratching the tip of one thumbnail with the other; her nail polish is chipping.

Maybe it’s more than the DUI Maggie has suspected. And Maggie suspects that Alex wants to talk.

“You can tell me, if you want,” Maggie says, her voice soft, as though Alex were a lost, frightened pet. “You don’t have to. But you can.”

Alex shrugs. “There’s a lot.” She pauses. But her eyes fix on her thumbnails and Maggie can see her thinking, so she waits, letting the clacking of the train along the tracks tick out the passage of time.

“My grandmother has Alzheimer’s,” Alex says, eventually. “She’s living at our house. The care attendant can’t be home alone with her. It’s a liability thing. So I’m there during the day, asleep, when my Mom’s at work, and my Mom’s there overnight.”

Maggie blinks.

She’s pretty sure she’s an asshole for assuming DUIs.

“That sounds like a lot,” she says.

“Yeah. My mom’s… it’s not great. She’s stressed out, for a whole bunch of reasons. And so am I, for a bunch of other reasons. So sometimes it’s just…” she puffs out a breath and spreads her fingers out in front of her, like an explosion.

Maggie nods. “Yeah, I bet.” 

The train clicks through their silence for a few seconds more, but the moment, somehow, doesn’t feel closed.

Maggie reaches for her test. It takes a few passes with her fingernail to get it to come up off the metal surface. “It would have been cool to have you as my TA,” she says, “but selfishly, I kind of like having you as my tutor.”

And Alex smiles, the tension released. She shrugs. “I kind of like being your tutor.”

Maggie smiles back. “Okay, then, we’ve got five minutes until the next stop. What can you teach me in five minutes, doc?”

Alex laughs at that, brief, but warm. “Not much, but let’s get started on nucleotides.” 

Maggie mock-salutes and leans in. Her shoulder brushes Alex’s.

She allows herself the small indulgence of waiting a second or two before she pulls away.

Later, at home, Maggie will realize that Alex looks a lot like Emily from the end of their relationship. When she and Emily had started dating, Emily wore ripped jeans and loved to dye stripes of bright colours into her hair. But by the end, when her Fine Arts degree had transitioned to a pretty great design gig for an advertising firm, she’d revamped to a more corporate wardrobe and dyed her hair back to a more natural reddish-brown.

Maggie would bet that Alex’s dye is the same number, the same brand.


	6. Alex

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They’re packing up at the end of the ride when Alex hears herself say, “Let me give you my phone number.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Maggie performs a small act of defiance in commemoration of a difficult day, and in which Maggie and Alex are both Useless Lesbians (tm).

Tutoring Maggie has felt good from the beginning, but when she starts coming back with better grades to show for it, it becomes the best part of Alex’s day.

She doesn’t give a fuck about her work at LuthorCorp. It’s boring and mechanical, testing rates of glucose metabolism in different bacterial solutions once every hour; a third-year undergraduate intern could do it. But they needed to contract someone for the duration of the year-long study, and Alex hopes that by the end of a year she’ll have figured out what the hell she’s going to do next. If she’s going to apply for reinstatement to NCU, or maybe try to do something else.

Working with Maggie makes her think that maybe she should look into applying to go back into the PhD program and scrap the MD side. Maybe she could try to be a professor or something. She couldn’t get hired at a good school with her transcript, but maybe, like, a community college or something. NC Community College is a huge system. 

It’s an idea, anyway. And having an idea is enough to help her stand a little taller.

Maggie listens carefully, and asks good questions, and picks things up fast when they’re presented clearly. And as the days tick along, it becomes clear that Maggie is _ interested _ in this. She says as much, one day:

“Alex, you’ve made me actually _ like _ this stuff. I never thought I’d say that.”

“It’s kind of cool once you crack into it,” Alex says. “You start to understand how all these biological systems work.”

Maggie’s on the train, working and studying, every single day that Alex commutes.

Until one day, around the middle of February, she’s not.

Alex doesn’t worry. Everyone gets sick sometimes. 

But the next day, Maggie doesn’t seem sick, or like she’s recovering from being sick. She seems tired, though, like she didn’t sleep enough last night.

Alex follows Maggie to the back of the train, like she does every day, and hands the textbook to Maggie to arrange on the shelf.

Maggie’s hand flips through the pages, and Alex notices she’s wearing one of those rubber bracelet bands. She doesn’t usually wear it. In fact, Alex is pretty sure it’s a violation of the NCRT uniform dress code. 

It’s rainbow-coloured, with “NATIONAL CITY PRIDE” stamped into the side in white letters.

_ Oh _ , Alex thinks. _ Oh _. She hadn’t known --

Well, whatever. She’s known a few gay people. None of them girls, now that she thinks about it, but. Whatever.

“I missed you yesterday,” she says. 

Maggie glances up. She smiles, but it’s not her usual smile, the one that makes her eyes look soft. This one doesn’t reach her eyes at all.

“Yeah, sorry. It was a long day.”

“I bet. Did you, um.” She glances at Maggie’s bracelet. “Did you do something cool with your girlfriend?”

And Maggie tenses. Her hand keeps flipping through the textbook pages, and Alex knows she’s not paying attention because she’s three chapters past the one they’re working on, and she’s turning them further away.

“Sorry,” Alex says. “I guess I just thought -- it was Valentine’s day, and you’re wearing--” she gestures vaguely toward Maggie’s wrist. 

Maggie stops turning pages and slips a finger under the bracelet, tugging at it, thumbnail picking at the edge of one of the white letters printed there. “No, I don’t have a girlfriend,” she says. Then she rushes on, as if correcting herself: “I mean, if I had someone, it would be a girlfriend. But I don’t.” 

Alex nods. “Okay.” Then she smiles, tries to go for reassuring. “I guess I just missed you yesterday. Thought maybe, since it was Valentine’s day...”

Maggie laughs drily and looks down at the book. She shakes her head a little--embarrassed, maybe?--and begins to turn the pages back in the right direction. “Yeah, Valentine’s day. Whatever.”

Something twitches in the corner of Maggie’s eye, like she’s flinching. Alex understands that there are people who feel like Maggie apparently does, that Valentine’s day is about overpriced dyed flowers and cards that drop glitter all over your kitchen counter. 

But Alex thinks of the card from her mother, tucked in her purse, given to her earlier this evening with a hug and a kiss to the top of her head. And things aren’t great between Alex and her mom these days, but the card means _ I love you _ , it means _ I know we fight a lot these days but you’re still important to me _. 

She’ll stand it at her work station, up on the shelf and out of the way, where people can see it and know that Alex has someone who loves her.

Even if it’s just her mother.

But, “Yeah, I guess Valentine’s day is sort of lame,” Alex hears herself saying.

She isn’t sure why she says that.

Maggie shrugs. “Honestly I just wasn’t feeling great yesterday.” She’s finally found the page, and she presses her palm down the galley to hold it open, even though it holds open just fine by itself. “So,” she says, in a tone that indicates clearly that the last line of conversation is over. “Thermodynamics.”

Alex nods, and shakes her hair back behind her shoulders. “Right. Endothermic and exothermic reactions.”

They work through a few pages and balance a few practice equations, Alex checking Maggie’s work while Maggie checks tickets. 

They’re packing up at the end of the ride when Alex hears herself say, “Let me give you my phone number.” 

Maggie’s eyebrows rise.

“I mean,” Alex says, “so you can still ask me questions if you’re sick. Or like, when you’re working on this stuff on the weekend, or whatever.”

Maggie half smiles at Alex, her chin crinkling. “That’s really nice of you, Alex. Sure.” 

She fishes her iPhone out of her bag, opens it to a new contact screen, and hands it to Alex. Alex has a strange, momentary panic over how to enter her own name (‘Alex’? ‘Train Alex’? ‘Alex Danvers’? What’s Maggie’s system? She has no idea). She settles on her full name, first and last, and then hands it back.

If their fingers brush a little when Alex hands the phone back, Alex doesn’t think much about it. 

“Thanks,” Maggie says.

Alex smiles.

The train is empty now. It’s the last trip of the night, and Alex knows that Maggie has to grab a garbage bag and some latex gloves from the locked cabinet and walk the length of the train, picking up whatever trash has been left behind. She shifts her purse higher on her shoulder and begins to slip past her toward the door. She’s on the second of the three steps down when Maggie says:

“Wait, Alex.”

Alex pauses.

“I just,” Maggie says, her voice quiet and nervous. “I’m not looking for anything. Right now.”

Alex frowns at her. “Okay,” she says, confused.

And then it clicks.

The phone number.

On the day after Valentine’s day, when Maggie’s wearing a rainbow wristband.

“Oh!” Alex says, “Oh, no, no. That’s not what I--"

“Oh,” Maggie’s eyes flash wide. “I thought, I mean, I thought you might be--”

“Yeah, totally, but I mean, no, I wasn’t, I’m not--”

Red creeps up Maggie’s neck from her collar. “Right, of course you’re not.”

Alex feels a sudden panic, a frantic energy firing up her throat from her gut. “I’m straight,” she says, like that will bring her heart rate down.

Maggie nods. “Right. Of course.” 

Her heart rate does not come down.

“I’ll, um, I’ll see you tomorrow,” Maggie says.

“Yeah,” Alex says, “have a good night.”

“You too.”  
  
As she walks down the platform, Alex wonders if she’s managed to take this thing, this small thing that’s given her happiness these past weeks, and make it profoundly awkward.

But when she steps out of the station onto the sidewalk for the short walk to work, her phone buzzes.

**Unknown (maybe Maggie?): **hey, this is maggie

Alex smiles and saves the contact.


	7. Maggie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maggie doesn't wear rainbow stuff.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy #flofest!
> 
> Incidentally, I made a playlist for this fic around when I posted the last chapter. It's here, on Spotify, if you want to listen to it too: sptfy.com/dqeT

Maggie doesn’t wear rainbow stuff, really. If she had a car, she wouldn’t put one of those Human Rights Campaign equals signs on it. If she were butch, she’d be butch, but she’s not. She can pass for straight most of the time, and most of the time, that’s what she prefers: to not be noticed. To not stand out.

There was a guy she knew in her first year of college who gave her shit about it. Things were different for him: he was tall and thin and twinky, and as far as she knew he preferred “he” pronouns but some days he was more comfortable wearing a skirt than pants.

“We have a responsibility to be visible,” he’d say, “all of us, all the time. Being just like everyone else doesn’t get us protections, Maggie, it’s just a neoliberal cop-out.”

But he hadn’t been a brown, gay kid in rural Nebraska. His parents drove down from Sacramento to attend a Prop 8 rally with him. 

He didn’t understand that she had been far, far too visible for years. That being invisible was, for her, as much a political act as her visibility had been, because it was an assumption of power that had been denied her for her entire adolescence.

But she got this wristband from a booth at Pride a few years ago. She only ever wears it on Valentine’s day. She looks at it, and tries to remember that people like her are supposed to be proud.   
  
This is the tenth Valentine’s day since… 

Since.

So she takes a deep breath and grits her teeth and wears the wristband to work. Just for a day. A few eyes linger on it when she reaches for tickets. There’s a girl in car four who gives her a tight, nervous smile, like they share a secret. Otherwise, nobody but Alex seems to take any notice.

Alex, who has her phone number now.

Maggie isn’t sure, at first, what that will mean. Will they become texting buddies? Alex had said that Maggie could text with biochem questions. But her name shows up near the top of Maggie’s contacts list every time she opens it. She feels like the decision to use that number will mark the transition of their relationship from this tutoring-acquaintanceship into something that looks like an actual friendship. 

But since Alex was the one who suggested trading numbers, Maggie doesn’t feel like she can be the one to send the first message and break that ice.

They meet every day, and tutor every day, and make a bit of small talk around the tutoring. Maggie learns that Alex is 23, a year younger than Maggie herself. 

“Damn, Alex,” Maggie says, “what kind of child wonder are you?”

Alex blushes and looks down, clearly feeling awkward, that long hair falling between them like a curtain.

“No, no, I just -- I had some AP credit from high school so I got through college in three years. And then signed up for this accelerated MD/PhD program because, I don’t know, I guess I just hate myself.”

“Huh,” Maggie says, trying to keep her face neutral, because buzzing through accelerated programs in high school and college typically involves not also having part-time jobs, and Maggie has literally never not worked since she was old enough to be legally employed.

She hates that she feels like she should be ashamed to be taking six years to finish her Bachelor’s, when she knows that by reasonable measures, she should be proud.

She reminds herself not to judge. That rich, beautiful, ridiculously smart white girls have their struggles too -- even if it’s sometimes hard to see what they are from the outside. Alex has opened up about her own struggles, a little, and they were real.

Maggie will never care for a grandparent with Alzheimer’s. Maggie will never care for an aging grandparent, period. Most of the time, when she thinks about it, it makes her angry. But she’s spent so much of her life coping with her abandonment issues and lack of family that it’s helpful to be reminded that families bring their own baggage with them, too.

Not quite tossing-a-fourteen-year-old-to-the-curb-in-Nebraska-winter kinds of baggage, but. Still.

Maggie scores an 83 on her next biochem quiz, and thinks about texting Alex about it.

She doesn’t. She waits and tells Alex in person the next day, and wonders when they’ll ever text. If it’ll ever happen, or if their exchange of phone numbers will end up being a symbolic thing that never actually matters.

But it does happen. Two weeks after Valentine’s day, Maggie gets her first texts from Alex on her break between trips:

**Alex Danvers: ** hey maggie, its alex

**Alex Danvers: ** just wanted to give you a heads-up that I won’t be on the train again until thurs

**Alex Danvers: ** but you can text me if you have biochem questions 

They are, fortunately, an easy enough few texts to answer.

**Me: ** Thanks, Alex

**Me** : Everything ok?

**Alex Danvers** : yeah

The dots dance on the bottom of her screen, showing that Alex is typing. They pause, then vanish, then start up again, and then stop.

Maggie waits a minute, and then begins to type out a reply --  _ Okay, take care, I’ll see you Thursday  _ \-- when the dots start up again, and this time they don’t stop.

**Alex Danvers** : we just realized its time for grandma to move into a memory care home

Oh, no.

Maggie knows that Alex’s family has had 24-hour in-home care for her grandmother for months. That’s why Alex works nights, she said -- so that, in case of emergency, the home aide can wake her up for help.

**Me** : Shit. I’m so sorry to hear that

**Alex Danvers** : it’s ok

**Alex Danvers** : it’s for the best I think

**Alex Danvers:** mom’s taking it hard, though. So I told her i’d take care of getting grandma packed up and settled

Maggie wonders what you’re supposed to say to a friend whose grandmother has Alzheimer’s and who needs to be moved into care.

Maggie wonders how her own grandmother is doing. Her father’s mother passed away before she was born. Her mother’s mother lives in Oaxaca, and Maggie hasn’t seen her since she was 12 or heard from her since…

Since.

It’s a rabbit she tries not to chase.

She blinks down at the text and tries to imagine what it’s like to move a family member with dementia, who disorients easily. Who forgets language.

There’s nothing to say, really.

**Me** : Let me know if I can help with anything, okay? Take care

**Alex Danvers** : I think i’m good, but thanks maggie

**Me: ** Of course. See you Thursday?

**Alex Danvers** : See you thursday :)


End file.
